British Academy Literature Week

Thursday 22 October

THE ROYAL SOCIETY
6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG

CONTEMPORARY POETRY IN THE THEATRE

5.00pm
THE JOSEPHINE HART POETRY HOUR

The British Academy is delighted to host The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour as part of its Literature Week programme.

The Poetry Hour performs (as on this occasion) away from its institutional base at the British Library. For each such evening, the novelist Josephine Hart provides her own insightful commentary to poems read by leading actors and literary and theatrical friends. She matches her readers to her choice of poets and poems, so that her audiences will hear even well-known and well-loved poems and passages lifted off the page, and as if for the first time. Her Words that Burn: how to read poetry and why: Poems from Eight Great Poets was published in 2009, with a CD with readings by Eileen Atkins, Edward Fox, Charles Dance, Dominic West and others. Catching Life by the Throat, also with a CD, went into all schools teaching 12 to 18 year olds.

The actors taking part are now confirmed - Charles Dance, Kenneth Cranham and Elizabeth McGovern.

6.30pm
BEYOND VERSE?

An exploration of Poetic Theatre featuring Frank McGuinness, Grey Gowrie, Edith Hall and chaired by Dame Gillian Beer. 

In this panel discussion, Grey Gowrie, Edith Hall and Frank McGuinness will reflect on the role and standing of poetry in the contemporary theatre, taking the themes for their discussion from 20th century revivals of ‘poetic’ theatre, new translations of classical drama and the contemporary theatre. How far has a ‘poetry of the stage’ survived and developed while the writing for the stage of verse drama has declined? Is it possible accurately to ascribe the success of literary theatre from Beckett and Pinter onwards to the survival of a ‘poetic’ theatre, more broadly defined and  sympathetically received?

JOSEPHINE HART. Born and raised in Ireland, Josephine Hart was a Director of Haymarket Publishing and founded Gallery Poets (now the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library) before going on to produce a number of West End plays, including the award winning The House of Bernarda Alba by Lorca, Noël Coward’s The Vortex, The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch and Let Us Go Then, You and I. She presented the series Books by My Bedside for Thames TV. She is the bestselling author of Damage (filmed by Louis Malle), Sin (adapted by Théâtre Blu), Oblivion, The Stillest Day and The Reconstructionist   (filmed by Roberto Ando). Her most recent novel is The Truth about Love (2009).

FRANK MCGUINNESS is Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin. His plays include: Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1985; Hampstead Theatre, London, 1986), Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me   (Hampstead, West End and Broadway, 1992), Dolly West’s Kitchen (Abbey, 1999; Old Vic, 2000) and There Came a Gypsy Riding (Almeida, London, 2007). His most recent adaptations include Racine’s Phaedra (2006), Ibsen’s The  Lady from the Sea and Sophocles’ Oedipus (both 2008) and Euripides’ Helen (premiered at the Globe Theatre in August 2009). He is a member of Aosdána and lives in Dublin.

GREY GOWRIE taught English and American literature at Harvard and University College London. He has been a Cabinet minister, a company chairman, Chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain and Provost of the Royal College of Art. He published his first collection of poems in 1972. His New and Selected Poems, including the acclaimed sequence ‘The Domino Hymn: Poems from Harefield’, was published in 2008. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Organised in association with the
Institute of English Studies, University of London